Web site design

[Steve]

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Prioritize: Good Content Bubbles to the Top  

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox


If everything is equally prominent, then nothing is prominent. It is 
the job of the designer to advise the user and guide them to the 
most important or most promising choices (while ensuring their 
freedom to go anywhere they please).  

On today's Web, the most common mistake is to make everything 
too prominent: over-use of colors, animation, blinking, and graphics. 
Every element of the page screams "look at me" (while all the other 
design elements scream "no, look at me"). When everything is 
emphasized, nothing is emphasized.  

But it's just as bad to make everything equally bland.  

Here are some ways of using prioritization to guide users:  

Editorially select the most important stories or items. Give them 
bigger headlines or more prominent placement. Old principle which 
newspapers have used for more than a hundred years.

Use sales statistics to discover the best-selling products and place 
them on top of search listings. By definition, most customers will be 
looking for the best-sellers, so it is user-hostile to bury them in a 
search listing that is organized by some impenetrable information 
retrieval algorithm (or worse: sorted by SKU numbers or other 
internal attributes that don't matter to users). Look at the search 
results for "Palm" on Buy.com and you will see three best-sellers on 
top, followed by about 60 other products (other than good 
prioritization, Buy.com has a miserable search results page: hard to 
scan; weird abbreviations and symbols). 

Use server traffic to track areas of the site that are seeing unusually 
strong activity and place links to these areas on the home page: not 
only will you save users clicks, but it's also a way of making people 
aware of the current buzz. The Motley Fool does so to good effect by 
keeping abreast of the activity of its many discussion boards and 
placing references to humming ones on a "hot topics" page that is 
linked from the home page (and summarized right on the home 
page). 

Use reputation management to predict who will write the best 
contributions: if somebody was highly rated in the past, then their 
new material deserves featured placement. Epinions has reputation 
data that identifies the most trusted reviewers, and it gives high 
prominence to these writers' postings even before they have been 
rated by anybody. Simply highlight the most popular items in a list 
that is sorted by another criterion. I use this idea myself in my list of 
old Alertbox columns. On slowly changing pages, mark new items 
with a little "new" glyph. This is not necessary on pages that change 
all the time (say, newspaper home pages) since the assumption is 
that most items will be new on such pages.  

There are two main types of prioritization:  

1.  In lists of items, make sure the ones the user is most likely to 
want come out on top or are made to stand out. 

2.  Content that is deep within the site sometimes needs to be 
brought out and featured at higher levels to make users understand 
what's new or hot.  

The goal is to give users more of what they need. And easier access 
to what they need. This is not always the same as giving people 
what they want: Customization does allow users to set their own 
priorities; thus it is one way to identify content that should be 
highlighted or featured. But the user's own choices are insufficient 
as the only basis for interface prioritization. The other mechanisms I 
have discussed must be employed as well to guide users to things 
they didn't know they needed.  

Disclosure: I am on the advisory board for Epinions and have also 
done work for The Motley Fool.  

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